# Watches


I’ve been thinking a lot about watches over the past few months -- like a _lot_
about watches. If I look at my Chrome browser tabs, most of them are watch
related. The immediate reason for this is that I have a few friends who got into
fancy mechanical watches a few years ago, and their influence has slowly rubbed
off on me. But in reality, the interest predates my friends' recent influence by
decades.

When I was young, I was given my first watch -- one of those digital
multifunctional [Timex IronMan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Ironman)
watches -- by my grandfather. I loved it and wore it every day. Years later,
when my grandfather passed away, I ended up sorting through much of his watch
collection. He had dozens of watches, and most of them didn’t fit my style at
the time, so I (regrettably) only kept a few. The time I spent helping my family
organize his estate was a blur, happening during a particularly turbulent time
towards the end of high school.

My grandfather had several interests that I’ve subconsciously picked up from him
over the years: photography, pens, and now watches.

In the end, I kept three of his watches. One was a mechanical Seiko with his
name engraved on it. I got it ticking a few months ago, but it clearly needs
servicing; it only runs for a few minutes before stopping. The other two were
quartz watches, and they both work perfectly. None of them are fancy in the
watch enthusiast sense, but they still hold an immense amount of sentimental
value.

I’ve been wearing his old Timex Expedition for a few years now, and it’s become
something of a good luck charm. I’ve worn it on job interviews, my first
[flight](/blog/2025/12/27/Notes-from-Early-Flight-Training/), among many other
“milestone” days. It fits my rather small wrist well, and was the first leather
strapped watch that I enjoyed wearing.

---

The other watch that I regularly wear is a
[Timex Weekender](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Timex_Weekender.jpg) that I
got a few years ago, after being fed up with the noise and tethered feeling that
came along with wearing an Apple Watch.

It’s a noisy quartz watch. You can hear it ticking from across a quiet room.
It’s gotten scratched a few times, as I wear it frequently and it has a cheap
mineral glass crystal. I like the fact that it’s an imperfect object. It tells
the time with sufficient accuracy, but that’s about it. No notifications, no
vibrating buzzes, nothing to recharge, not even a date window. It’s purely
utilitarian, in a way that makes me treat time as something to be casually
observed rather than optimized around or fixated upon.

One of the first meditation instructions I received, when I was starting to
practice somewhat seriously, was to listen to the silence between the ticks of a
clock. Not to the ticks themselves, but the space in between them. That
instruction and this watch have fused in a way that makes me remember it
whenever I wear it.[^1]

---

This Christmas, I gave several watches to people I care about, which brought me
a lot of joy -- quite plausibly more for me than them. I got my brother his own
Timex Weekender, with a velcro strap that I hope will complement the Timex
IronMan that he wears quite often. And I got my Dad a mechanical Seiko as a
potential complement for the Apple Watch he wears regularly.

As for myself, I “accidentally” bought a
[Casio F-91W](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W) as another no-frills
digital quartz watch to wear. I have my eyes set on getting a mechanical Seiko
for myself, but I’m trying to track down an out-of-production green dial model
which has taken some time.

In any case, I’m also planning to finally get my grandfather's Seiko serviced.
It's sat in a drawer for years, and I'd like to wear it again.

[^1]:
    As an aside, this meditation instruction works much better for a
    second-ticking quartz watch than it does for 3-4Hz mechanical watches